Those Slow-Moving Canadians

National Ballet of Canada director James Kudelka on the difference between Canadian and American dancers: It hardly needs mentioning that work like this is harder to do in a cold climate, and Kudelka believes that the weightier, slower look of Canadian dancers may actually have something to do with things like thicker blood and winter lethargy. ‘We’re less energetic than American dancers. Balanchine got dancers from Texas and Florida and California, where it was always summer. The bodies from the Midwest got left on the tarmac’.”